


Karkat: Go Unwilling to Summer Camp

by OrieJai



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Humanstuck, M/M, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 02:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4373336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrieJai/pseuds/OrieJai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing city boy Karkat Vantas wants is to go to summer camp. But when his parents insist, he's forced to spend the summer in the woods where he meets Dave Strider who is a photographer, sunglasses wearing douche extraordinaire. But things get interesting when Karkat and Dave a paired up for a trip into the woods alone together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Karkat: Go Unwilling to Summer Camp

It was the first time you had left the city for more than a couple of days. Your parents, who had both grown up in small towns, insisted that you needed to leave the urban setting for a breath of fresh air.

So what better way to do that than to send you summer camp?

Except, while growing up in the city, you had very limited knowledge concerning nature, let alone how to survive it. Telling the difference between any number of plants was almost rocket science to you. You would rather be home reading your young adult romance novels and romantic comedies than hiking trails, building fires, and avoiding poisonous plants and venomous animals. 

The first couple of weeks weren’t too bad. You stayed in a cabin with a couple of boys your age. While you didn’t always get along with them, you almost tended to like most of them.

John Egbert was pretty dorky and liked to play pranks, but you could handle avoiding a bucket of water above the door every so often, which seemed to be his personal favorite prank to play. Of course it left you checking every ajar door, but it wasn’t as bad as occasionally ending up wet, freezing, and hit in the head with a bucket.

Gamzee Makara, while prone to almost eating half the poisonous plants, was pretty mellow and for the most part just zoned out on his bunk. While you often had to keep him in check and made sure he only ate foods from the dining hall and whatever his parents sent him, he was a pretty lovable guy. You only wish you could do something about those horns.

Jake English, John’s cousin, was pretty skilled in the wilderness and was often the one to inform everyone when a plant was poison ivy or how to handle a skunk if it happened to come into the camp. Considering his grandfather ran the camp, him and Jade tended to have an above average knowledge of the wilderness and firearms. Jade was John’s sister, but had taken more of a liking to the wilderness setting, as Jake had.

And Dirk Strider wasn’t so bad either and seemed well informed on much of the wilderness, though he hadn’t exactly experienced it firsthand, like Jake had. He usually hung around Jake most of the time; you didn’t pay much mind to him. 

And then, there was Dave Strider.

Dave was a pretty cocky son of a bitch that you wanted absolutely nothing to do with. Like Dirk, he always wore sunglasses, but he made it his absolute mission in life to make everything ironic and ten times more annoying that it was ever before. All he ever seemed to do was take pictures, rap, and make insanely long metaphors that ended with making little to no sense at all. He even insists on giving you these godawful nick names like Kitty Cat, Kit Kat, Karkles (inspired by Terezi), and plenty of others.

It was a couple weeks in that Camp Director Harley decided that everyone would go out into the woods and spend twenty four hours with one other person. Girls were paired with girls, and boys with boys. But, in order to make things fair, he would be the one assigning the pairs.

You would’ve been okay with almost anyone. Gamzee (who almost kills himself every day except by the influence of fellow campers), Sollux (a computer nerd who whines about not wanting to be here and only came to make his girlfriend happy), Jake (who is too peppy most of the time than you can stand, but would be a good balance since you know nothing of the wilderness and he lives it), Tavros (a freaking handicapped kid), and hell even John would’ve been fine. You could’ve handled a couple pies in the face.

And what do you fucking know?

You get the one person you absolutely cannot fucking stand.

“Hey Kit Kat, ready for our twenty four hour excursion into the wilderness together, bro?”

You could feel the burning hate rise inside of you as he ruffled your hair. He gave you a slight smile of satisfaction, knowing just how much you absolutely despised being touched, especially by him.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

The two of you find a clearing about a half hour walk away from the camp and start setting up a tent. One that the two of you have to share the whole night. 

Oh fuck, this was going to be a long ass night.

Dave makes the fire after your several unsuccessful attempts. Apparently, he had gone to this camp the past couple of years and while it didn’t make him an expert, it made him more knowledgeable than you on these matters. It turns out that Doritos can be used to help start a fire, which is helpful since it seems that all he ever eats seems to be Doritos.

You poked at the foil packs shoved into the embers of the fire that would soon be your meals with a stick as Dave Strider rambled on and one about a metaphor you could no longer even keep up with. There was something about Obama and orange cream-sickles mixed in there, but you hardly found it worth the amount of brain power it would’ve taken to understand exactly what he was talking about.

Apparently he had taken out his camera sometime during his speech and began taking pictures, alerting you with little clicking noises.

You didn’t bother to wonder what of.

Darkness fell and finally the two of you retired into the tent. It was small, but you had enough room so there were at least a couple inches between the two of you, which was a small luxury you were glad to have.

Now, while you had stayed in a creaky cabin the past week where it was a good two minute walk away from the bathrooms, you had never actually slept in a tent before. All the sounds of nature started to bombard your ears and every little noise sounded like impending danger.

“Holy fuck did you hear that?” you asked, shaking. You would tell him that it was because you were cold, but he knew it was because you were a terrified city boy with no outdoorsy experience. While he had grown up in Houston, his Bro had sent him and Dirk to this camp because it was good “training.”

“Its just the wind. Go to sleep,” Dave groaned, rolling over in his sleeping bag. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

“I don’t know Strider, it sounded like a fucking bear. I don’t want a bear tearing up the tent just to fucking eat us, do you? Oh god, we’re going to end up like those kids in the first five minutes of season one episode two of Supernatural, aren’t we?”

“Dude, there aren’t any monsters or bears around, so I think we’re good. I mean, what, did they get eaten by a werewolf or something? I don’t fucking watch that show.”

“It was a wendigo, goddammit. A human turned monster because they became a cannibal.”

“I can absolutely promise you that something like that exists out here because, oh look, we have so many dead bodies lying around. No, just stop, okay. Jade’s grandpa wouldn’t allow that. And he especially wouldn’t allow us to get eaten by bears.”

There was another noise, and suddenly you jumped the couple of inches where you’ve plastered yourself against the Strider.

“Whoa Kitty Kat, if I knew you’d act like this, I would’ve started telling you ghost stories around the camp fire.”

You grumble, “Shut the fuck up Strider, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Oh you are scared, aren’t you? Scared a bear is gonna come and eat us or chase us out of our tent?”

“Well isn’t it lucky that I have a second person here? Because, if a bear were to chase us, I wouldn’t have to outrun the bear, I’d just have to outrun you.”

“Harsh. You’re hurting my feeling here, Kit Kat.”

Rolling your eyes, you retort, “You don’t have feelings Strider, so shut up.”

He gives you a smirk. “Fine.” He rolls so his back is facing you and you can no longer see his face.

You start taking deep breaths to calm down, knowing that if you can outlast the night, you can spend the rest of the summer in the shitty cabin at the camp. Or, better yet, you could go home and spend all summer on your laptop with your rom coms and TV shows to binge watch and- holy fucking shit why are there so many noises in the woods.

Eventually, you find yourself with your face shoved into the back of Dave Strider, your hands gripping at his shirt.

“Relax Kit Kat.” He turns over and faces you, pulling you close to him. “Goddamn. You’re quite the city boy, aren’t you?” You don’t answer. “Thought so. I used to be scared shitless of this like you had. But Jade was a super good influence on me. You know, we dated awhile, but we’re just friends now and she’s pretty cool. I started coming here when I was like eight with Dirk. Dirk was nine. He had started going when he was eight and I spent that summer super fucking bored so Bro sent me up here with him the next year and we’ve been staying ever since. Except the one year John infected the camp with swine flu, but that’s a whole nother story altogether. Anyways, so now I’m sixteen, right, so I’ve been coming here for eight fucking years. Crazy, right?”

And the Strider continued to babble on and on. While you pretended to be annoyed, it was actually kind of soothing. His talking covered the sounds of the woods around you and finally you were comfortable and not jumping every five seconds.

Eventually, Dave just stopped talking. You looked at him. He was still wearing his fucking sunglasses yet it was dark as shit and they were supposed to be asleep. But, before you could comment on how much of a douchebag he looked like, he removed his glasses and- holy fuck he has these red eyes that seem a bit demonic but kind of beautiful and wow.

“I could kiss you right now if I wanted to.”

You sat there frozen. Kiss you? You knew that Dirk had a thing for Jake, who was probably the reason he kept coming back, but why would Dave want to kiss you? And of course you had absolutely no desire to kiss him, right?

After a couple of seconds you unfreeze and say, “But you don’t want to, so you won’t.”

He gives a slight smirk. “Sure, Karkat, whatever helps you sleep at night.”

 

You finally woke up the next morning alone in your tent. Your back hurts but you slept pretty peacefully last night. Finally, you get the drive to sit up and get out of the tent only to find that Dave is making breakfast. “Rise and shine, Crabkat. We’ve gotta eat, pack up, then head back for camp and be back before dark.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t you like it? I thought of it last night when you were snuggling up to me like you were a girl at a scary movie.”

“That’s sexist.”

He shrugged and went back to what he was doing. You started rolling your sleeping bag so that after eating the two of you could take down the tent and head back to a cabin with a heater and bunks and people other than Dave Strider.

You sit down beside him. “So, what the fuck was that all about last night? You have a crush on me or something, Strider?”

His face remains expressionless. “Does it matter?”

“Not really, I guess.”

He gives his signature Strider slight smirk. “I mean, it would probably only happen if you dared me to do it or something, seeing as how I don’t back down from dares.” You knew this. He had told the whole cabin one night John insisted you all play Truth or Dare and lived up to that statement with each dare. “But you….”

“What?”

“Oh nothing.”

“Strider, what?”

“You’d probably be too scared to dare me to do it.”

You probably saw that coming, but that didn’t make it any less shocking that he said it. He is challenging you, Karkat Vantas, because he knows that you don’t like to back down. You can be pretty impulsive, as you have learned, just as you are now.

“Okay then, do it Strider. Prove it.”

You surprise yourself as the words slip from your mouth, you go to take them back, but find yourself tongue tied. Do you actually want to kiss him?

He turns your head towards him and holds your chin as he leans in and presses his lips to yours. His are surprisingly smooth and he kisses like he’s known how to his whole life.  
They are a stark contrast to your chapped lips and unpracticed kissing skills, as you’ve only ever kissed Terezi back when you were thirteen during a game of spin the bottle. Guessing that’s what prompted your initial crush on her, she ignored it and continued to be your friend. 

Once he pulled away, you were breathless and staring intently at him. Instead of staring back, he stood up and started to take the tent down.

It was quiet on your walk back to camp, and it wasn’t until about ten you got there. Only about six people had returned at that point, the two of you making eight. The only two that hadn’t returned by nightfall later that day had been Gamzee and Tavros, which was a bad combination in the first place, considering Gamzee had a crush on the disabled boy.

Of course, you avoided Dave Strider like the plague for the next day and a half. It wasn’t until he cornered you in the craft hall that you finally had to give into his advances and actually talk to him.

“Come with me.” He grabbed your arm and pulled you outside and down the slope to the lake. From there, the two of you walked to the dock where he threw you a life vest and called to the life guard Jane that the two of you would be out on a boat. “Get in.”

Once you buckled up the life vest, you hopped in the boat, Dave not far behind as he untied the boat and pushed off from the dock and rowed the both of you to the middle of the lake. It was fairly quiet that day, which was odd since going onto the boats seemed to be a favorite activity for some people. The only ones on the lake at that moment was Feferi and Eridan, who seemed to enjoy the water too much. You once heard Dave asking Sollux if they were mermaids or fish people, since Sollux had dated Feferi a few years ago. 

Dave pulled the oars in and sat back a bit, looking at you through his dark shades. “Alright, Vantas. You’ve been avoiding me since we got back yesterday. I don’t even know how you avoided me last night since we sleep in the same fucking cabin but we obviously need to fucking settle this, so start talking.” 

“Look, I didn’t actually expect you to kiss me, dipshit. So yeah, I was kind of freaked out that you actually fucking did that.”

“I told you that I don’t back down from dares.”

Wanting anything to do to change the subject, you did the next best thing. “Then I dare you to show me your photography.”

A pale blond eyebrow raised above the young Strider’s shades. He dug the camera case from his bag and took it out of the water proof bag he kept it in. “Get it wet Vantas, and I will make you pay for this expensive piece of shit that I worked for day in and day out. Costs a fucking fortune.”

The first couple were of the city. People laughing and crying, homeless people, teenagers having fun, and so on. And then it changed to nature. He obviously hadn’t had time to download the photos onto a drive at that point otherwise it wouldn’t have started so early in the summer.

There were pictures of animals and plants and then suddenly there were more people. You found a couple of Jade, some John, an occasional one of Dirk and Jake, but then you found pictures of you. You in the cabin or by the camp fire. Most of them were of you not paying attention and while there were a lot of bad shots, there were some pretty good ones. There would be occasional shots of nature or other people, but then it would go right back to you. As far as you knew, nobody other than Nepeta had feelings for you. Maybe Terezi did once upon a time, but she was pretty happy being single after a breakup with everyone’s favorite high juggalo Gamzee.

Perplexed, you sat there for a moment before handing his camera back. You waited for him to put it away before you continued. “Okay, well I need to know this Strider. Did you want to kiss me the other night? Like, no dare or anything, you actually wanted to kiss me.”

Dave Strider leaned closer to you, looking straight into your eyes. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” you breathed slowly.

He tilted his shades down so that you could see his red eyes, something he never does as far as you’re aware. 

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> I just got back from summer camp so this seemed appropriate. This is the first fic I will ever post on Ao3, and is also my first Homestuck fic to ever be posted. Please leave comments below and tell me what you think!


End file.
